9.22.2013

Oh how times change

Oh, how times changed.  My wife is not a morning person.  Her normal idea of early morning is about an hour after the sun comes up.  On weekends, when there were no real obligations driving our schedule I would wake up by my definition of late, usually around 7, then have a few hours to myself which I would use to get very important things done, like play video games.  My wife would wake up around 9ish, wander into a cup of coffee, then breakfast, then a shower.  When it was all said and done, on the really lazy days, the house would finally be up and ready for the day around 11 am.

Then baby.
Having a child changed all that.  My schedule stays the same.  Even after the infant feeding schedule turned into the toddler approximation of a reasonable routine waking up around 9 was no longer in the cards.  I still wake up at my normal time of somewhere around 6, but I no longer get to sleep in until 7 and more often than not I am up in the 5:30 range.  This is because this is when Max wakes up. 
Today is a perfect example of the change in our routine.  I find the family, at 8 am, playing outside in the last bit of reasonable temperatures before the sun finishes obliterating the prospect of having a good time with out the judicious application of water (either in sprinkler or pool form).  At 8 am, the entire family has been up, had the chance to dress, had a big breakfast of pumpkin spice wafffles (it is technically Autumn now), and I have even mowed the lawn.
Its hard to explain, without getting long winded, how surreal this seems.  In a reasonably short amount of time, we have gone from "don't even try to do anything before 10" to "Its a slow morning because it is after 8 and I have only done one useful thing".
My lovely wife has come such a long way.
I have a feeling this will all change with the arrival of baby #2.  I think we will be back to "don't even try to get anything done before 10".  Not because we are all sleeping in, but because it will take us 3-4 hours to wrangle 2 kids through the morning routine.